Programmers Advise on How To Fix Health Care Site

The Obama Administration’s plan to fix its glitch-prone HealthCare.gov website by hiring more consultants and bringing in droves of the best and the brightest, risks making the solution team too big to be effective, according to tech workers in the Mission District.

More people means more opinions and more mistakes, or, as tech entrepreneur Doug Simpson, 41, put it “[with a big team,] meeting in the middle just means you make a middling product. Group consensus never builds great products”

It’s a rule most programmers learn early on. Coined by the computer scientist Fred Brooks in the 1970s, Brook’s Law says that while bringing on more people to help meet a deadline seems logical, it can often slow down the process.

New people need to be trained and familiarized with a complex project, which takes time and resources. Additionally, the more people and teams that are involved, the more communication slows, and the longer it takes to achieve consensus on design decisions. In short, too many cooks can spoil the broth.